The Jewish institutions in Denver of any kind that endure for 50 years are few. Of those who do survive a half century, the odds are even steeper for those that began as widely misunderstood. Perhaps the best example is the so-called Jewish day school — the full time, Jewish school that assumes the responsibility for both the standard secular education and the intensive study of Hebrew and Jewish sacred texts.
As a tribute to the vision and tenacity of Denver’s Jewish leadership, two intensive Jewish day schools have already passed the half-century mark: Hillel Academy and Yeshiva Toras Chaim. This year, Beth Jacob High School joins this illustrious “winners’ circle.”
Think a tiny shul on its last legs, repurposed as a school. Think a few pioneering students. Think a small group of visionaries, led by Miriam and the late Sheldon K. Beren, who articulated the impossibility, for most Jewish youth, of the simultaneity of public high school and an observant Jewish life. Think the first girls high school of its kind in the US west of Chicago. Think a founding principal who uprooted himself to a Jewishly untilled land in the educational sphere.
“Ownership” is the word that the nonprofit world likes. “Taking ownership” is what the lay leadership of nonprofit organizations look for in the professionals who would lead them. Let the leader take ownership, take responsibility, for the institution, no matter what difficulties and crises might arise. Anyone who has ever been involved in a nonprofit organization knows that those leaders willing to “take ownership,” and to stick with it even for two decades, are real rarities. At Beth Jacob High School of Denver, double that estimate and throw in another decade to spare. That is the length of time that Rabbi Myer J. Schwab and his wife Bruria Schwab have awakened every day and thought of nothing else professionally than “their” school.
As if this were not enough, look to the same family, and the same institution, to see a next-generation Schwab assuming the reins. Up close or from afar, observers take it for granted that its leadership is, well, whatever the word for “more than stable”is. Search committees are a regular fact of life in most Jewish institutions. Not so at Beth Jacob. It was not just “ownership” that a young man undertook 50 years ago. It was lifetime ownership.
And what has this school accomplished? Hundreds of graduates who are skilled in Hebrew and learned in Jewish sacred texts, in the original language; who raise Jewish families; who contribute to the Jewish civic life in Denver and around the world; and who contribute to the panoply of professions today. Oh, and those Jewish families. By now, it’s not just Jewishly learned children. It’s grandchildren, too.
It’s also adults, since Beth Jacob founded the Denver Community Kollel, through which Jewish adults in Denver and Boulder have acquired their own skills in Hebrew and Jewish sacred texts.
Our profound gratitude to the Schwabs and to Beth Jacob’s founders, teachers, administrators and lay leaders who have embraced the often anonymous tasks of co-ownership, tenaciously sustaining the mission: vibrant Jewish generations to come.
Copyright © 2018 by the Intermountain Jewish News
